US-Cuba prisoner exchange - who are the 'Cuban Five'?

The released Cuban prisoners are veterans of the half-century long spy war
between America and Cuba

Posters with portraits of five Cubans jailed in the United States are dispayed in front of Cuba's Consulate in Sao Pablo, BrazilPhoto: NELSON ALMEIDA/AFP

By Colin Freeman, Chief foreign correspondent

5:19PM GMT 17 Dec 2014

The prisoner exchange between the US and Cuba marks the end of yet another chapter in America's half-century long war of espionage with the Communist island on its doorstep.

The three Cuban prisoners released are part of the so-called “Cuban Five”, a group of intelligence agents who were arrested in Miami a decade and a half ago. They were accused of spying on the local Cuban exile community, a hub for opposition to the Communist regime ever since the botched Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Cuba’s then leader, Fidel Castro, had accused CIA-backed expatriate groups of carrying out acts of terrorism on Cuban soil. Havana also pointed the finger at them over the 1976 bombing of Cubana Flight 455 from Barbados to Jamaica, which killed 73 people.

Known as La Red Avispa, or the Wasp Network, a squad of elite Cuban spies ring were then despatched to Miami to infiltrate the expats of "Little Havana". The network was then broken up in 1998 by the FBI, which had been watching their activities for years but found it more useful to monitor them from a distance.

Among them were the “Cuban Five” - Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, and René González - who were then charged on 25 different counts of espionage.

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The Wasp Network that they were part of had allegedly tried to infiltrate US Southern Command, the operation that supervises US military activity in Latin America and the Caribbean. Wasp agents had also got jobs as labourers at the Key West Naval station, from where they sent reports to Havana about aircraft movements.

One of the men, Gerardo Hernández, was further accused of conspiracy to commit murder in connection with the shooting down by Cuban military jets of two planes used by "Brothers to the Rescue", an anti-Castro organisation that specialised in assisting Cuban refugees trying to flee the regime by boat. Four people, all US citizens, were killed when the plane was brought down in 1996.

Predictably, the trial became politicised, with Miami's Cuban exile community pressing for an aggressive prosecution, and the Cuban authorities claiming that that the men had been framed. However, in 2001, before the trial had ended, the Cuban government admitted that all five defendants were indeed intelligence agents, a fact it had previously denied.

Havana insisted, though, that its agents had been sent to Miami to spy not on US government facilities but solely on the Cuban exile community. Of particular interest to them was a string of bombings in the Cuban capital in 1997, allegedly organised by Luis Posada Carilles, a CIA-trained Bay of Pigs veteran. Mr Carilles, who is still resident in the US, has reportedly admitted being behind the bombings, but denies involvement in Cubana Flight 455.

After a seven-month trial, Hernandez, Guerrero and Labañino were sentenced to life imprisonment, while Ferndando and René Gonzalez got 19 years and 15 years respectively. Four years ago, the US Supreme Court turned down an attempt to review their convictions, brought on the basis that in Miami, no jury would ever give Castro loyalists a fair hearing.

In Cuba itself, the “Five” have long been regarded as national heroes. Ferndando and René Gonzalez have already been released from custody after completing their sentences